"I've actually written two books, this is my second book on the Allman Brothers. My first one, "One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band" came out in 2014 which was a complete oral history of the band from before they formed up until their last show. This one is called "Brothers and Sisters: The Allman Brothers Band and the Album That Defined the '70s" and it focuses really intently around the era of the album "Brothers and Sisters" but not just on the album; it covers from 1971 when Duane Allman died to 1976 when they broke up for the first time."
Pittsburgh, PA native, New York Times best-selling author and current New Jersey resident Alan Paul has written multiple books. Over the years he has written a Stevie Ray Vaughn biography and several on the Allman Brothers Band prompting quotes such as, "Alan Paul is rock's finest narrative storyteller" and "If you want to know the real deal, read Alan Paul."
So, it is no surprise that his latest effort has thus far received critical acclaim but what may be surprising is the path he has taken to get here and how he turned his love of music and the Allman Brothers Band into a life-long journey; a journey you can hear about in person at Words Bookstore in Maplewood, NJ tonight at 7:30 p.m.
"How I got so interested is a long and convoluted answer but I'll try to give it to you quick," he began with a laugh. "I always loved the band since I was 12 or 13 years old around eighth grade, I grew up in Pittsburgh, my Social Studies teacher assigned an essay on a great American and I chose Duane Allman. I wish I could go back and interview 13 year old me about why I was so fascinated with him because it is interesting to me and I'm not quite sure; I just loved him. I had an older brother, who like many people, including Warren Haynes; he and I have spoken often about our older brothers and the big influence they've had on our music tastes and my brother had a huge role in that. I was just always attracted to them and when I became a journalist I started writing about them as a regular journalist and through that I developed good relationships with especially Dickie Betts and Warren Haynes as I was writing mostly for "Guitar World" at the time. Then I became friends with some of the crew, including Kirk West who was the "Tour Mystic," that was his title; he was the tour manager and so much more that they gave him the title of a "Mystic." Through him, I started to be able to have access backstage and to going on the road with them a bit and things like that and that's when I sort of transitioned from being a regular journalist writing about them to more of an insider which led to the book."
Ages such as 12 or 13 are somewhat formative or perhaps transitional may be a better term but according to Paul he really began appreciating music in general and what the Allmn Brothers were about a little later in his teen years.
"Like I said, I wish I could go back and interview 12 or 13 year old me and find out; he just really appealed to me," he continued. "It's easier for me to analyze what I like about it as an adult as I got more into music. I went to the University of Michigan and stumbled into a job literally in my first week or two there at a place called Rick's American Cafe. I was just trying to make some money and at first I was a bus boy, then a door man and then a waiter and the place had music five nights a week.and I was always into music, I went to a lot of shows as a kid but my real passion for live music was developed by the luck I had stumbling into that job. The place had great music; 10,000 Maniacs, Fishbone, NRBQ came through there but what they really excelled at was the Blues. I saw Koko Taylor, Son Seals, Lonnie Brooks, Albert Collins, Buddy Guy, Robert Cray and Johnny Copeland and what I saw was incredible to me. Often I'd see those guys two nights in a row and when I circled back and started listening to Rock again, a lot of it sounded over produced and sterile to me but the Allman Brothers managed to thread that needle where as I was getting into Blues and then Jazz; I lost my interest in a lot of Rock music but I never lost my interest in the Allman Brothers. They were able to be rooted in Blues and Jazz while of course being a rock band. So, to me, they became one of the only groups that could hit you in the head, the heart and the emotions all at the same time and to me they are just totally unique. Maybe I had some instinct of all that when I was 12 or 13 without being able to totally understand it or verbalize it; I wish I could understand that part of it better."
Primarily a writer for the aforementioned "Guitar World" magazine, Alan had access to many of music's biggest names but it seems he never strayed far from his love of the Allman Brothers. So ;what was the impetus for wanting to write a book?
"The first one; I was writing about them for 25 years and you'd think that I would've thought about writing a book a little earlier," he laughed once again. "It just finally kind of dawned on me that I was sitting on so much great information and I started pulling it together. The year 2009 was their 40th Anniversary and I wrote a very extensive cover story for "Guitar World" magazine in the oral history format and that was the first time that it really struck me. I was like, wow, this is a great magazine article but it is still only scratching the surface and if I can take every one of these little sections and expand them by four times; I'll really have something. So, it was from about 2009 when I had that idea until 2014 when the book came out where I was contemplating that but with this one, I was not planning on writing another Allman Brothers book at all but I had a long conversation during the pandemic; one of the upsides of the pandemic for a lot of us is that we talked on the phone more (laughs) and I had a long conversation with Brad Tolinski a long time friend and the editor of "Guitar World" for 25 years and we'd both written a few books at that point and we'd help each other and give each other ideas and we were talking about what to do next. So, we were talking about what to do next and he said, "I think that "Brothers and Sisters" is an unexplored era for the Allman Brothers" and I said, geez, I don't want to write another Allman Brothers book. He said, "You're crazy! You've got all of this expertise about a band that people care about and that is an important band in the history of Rock; I think you should do it" and we had a long conversation and I started exploring it. I decided pretty quickly that he was right. I thank him for the idea; what was really interesting about that era of the Allman Brothers was that it was their most popular era. They had their only real hit single "Ramblin' Man" and it was by far their best selling record. They never had that line-up again where it was one lead guitar player, Dickie Betts and a piano player, they were always a two guitar band.The piano player was Chuck Leavell who was an incredible piano player who has been the piano player for The Rolling Stones now for about 40 years and I think their music director but because it was a singular era and they never really sounded like that again; I felt it kind of drifted away and it wasn't really explored. There was so much in that era, the album itself, Greg Allman had just started his solo career, there was the Watkins Glen concert which was an incredible event that drew 600,000 plus people to the racetrack with the Grateful Dead and The Band which became two chapters in the book. It started off as one but there was too much to cover in one. Then there was the relationship with the Grateful Dead, not just Watkins Glen but it really peaked in that era.They did shows together at RFK Stadium in DC that drew 80,000 people; they were in the center of so much. There are people that pop-up in this book that are crazy; Geraldo Rivera appears a couple of times, Jimmy Carter because they were heavily involved in the Carter campaign and that's a thread that runs through the book and then Greg got married to Cher and there was a birth of a whole new celebrity culture; they were on one of the early covers of "People" magazine. So, there was just so much happening and all of it is covered in the book, it was a lot of fun because there was so much more than just writing about the album."
Going from not wanting to write another book on the same subject to writing a book on the same subject has its drawbacks and its benefits and this time Paul had a "Secret weapon" as well as some favorite moments while putting what he termed this "Daunting" project together.
"One Way Out" was in an oral history format so it was a collection of quotes carefully put together to create a narrative structure and they were all interviews that I did myself; 25 years of interviews and many new ones as well. "Brothers and Sisters" is quite different. There is a lot from my 25 years of interviews but I did a lot of new ones with Chuck Leavell and Jaimoe the original founding drummer, I also went back and had a lot of material from other interviews that I wasn't able to use before and I also did a ton of archival reading. So, there is a bibliography here that's probably about 10 or 12 pages long; probably 50 or 60 books, hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles, court cases, online interviews and then, my secret weapon, which sort of came out of the blue and was sort of a lifetime of working towards although not directly; Kirk West who I mentioned earlier and was the person who brought me in as sort of an insider was a super-fan and a fantastic photographer. During the '80s when the band was broken up, he decided to write a book on the Allman Brothers. So, he went around for about two years, mostly 1986 and '87 and he interviewed everybody in the band and a lot of other people like the road crew, promoters, lighting crew and managers for the purpose of writing a book. Then they reformed in 1989 and hired him initially as the tour manager and he never wrote the book, he became an employee of the band. So, his tapes were sort of gathering dust in his office in Macon, Georgia and mostly he had never even listened to them with the exception of a handful and he did a few short articles for a magazine but mostly he hadn't listened to them. So, when I started writing this book, Kirk called me and offered me the tapes. So, I flew down to Macon in September of 2021 and I came home with the tapes; hundreds and hundreds of hours of interviews; it was a wonderful but very daunting job. I had to digitize and listen to and then figure out how to transcribe hundreds of hours of interviews which was a lot of work that was fascinating and incredible because I was listening to these great interviews that had never been heard and because of the time period; they were broken up and they were talking to Kirk who was someone they trusted and didn't worry about tricking or taking advantage of them; they were very open. So, you have Greg talking about Dickie Betts and Dickie Betts talking about Greg and all of them talking about Duane Allman and the ups and the downs, it was really fascinating and those quotes are all over the book.Even beyond that, it had a bigger impact on my understanding. So, there is a lot of stuff that's not directly from those interviews but it deepened my understanding, I mean, obviously, I had written a book, "One Way Out" so I had a very good understanding and knowledge of the band before I started this project but I developed an even more deep and thorough understanding from the research and those interviews."
"There are a few moments that stood out, I can't just pick one," he continued to explain. "There are a few things that I was really delighted by and I think that readers will be too because if I was surprising myself after all these years, I figured I'd be surprising the readers. One was what became the two chapters on Watkins Glen. I knew a lot about Watkins Glen, I knew the basics, I had written about it in "One Way Out" but with this I went way deeper. I realized that I had the perspective of the Allman Brothers through mine and Kirk's interviews, the band members and management. I had the perspective of the promoters Jim Koplik and Shelley Finkel, I had the perspective of the Grateful Dead through their manager Sam Cutler and Phil Lesh, Bob Weir and a couple of the crew members, I had the perspective of The Band who were the third group there through Robbie Robertson and Levon Helm and I had Bill Graham but what I lacked was the voices of the people that were there. There were 600 to 650,000 people there and what I realized was, they were really the story; even more so than the bands. So, I put out a call to people who had been there and ended up hearing from about 100 people; I was overwhelmed by how many responded. I had to whittle that down but I talked to a lot of people and their stories were incredible. Once I was able to make sense of that and put their views into it, I feel like it really came alive. So, I do feel that I was able to give a 360 degree view from the bands, the promoters and the people in the audience including even some emergency medical technicians that were there, so I was really pleased with those two chapters.The other thing that stands out for me is; I spoke to Cameron Crowe the great author, writer and filmmaker about this because he did a lot of writing about the Allman Brothers. His movie, "Almost Famous" which is one of my personal favorite movies is really based on his experience with the Allman Brothers Band in 1973 when he was on the road writing a cover story for Rolling Stone Magazine. I was able through conversations, primarily with him, some other people and the interviews from Kirk, to piece together the real story of what happened with Cameron Crowe on the road with the Allman Brothers which led to Greg confiscating his tapes and gave birth to the idea that became "Almost Famous." So, that's another chapter that I was really excited about and proud of and happy to put out into the world. The chapter will blow your mind because I really laid it out there. This is the one way that it gets a little easier every time; when I wrote "One Way Out" I was basically just a guy from "Guitar World" Magazine writing a book about the Allman Brothers and a lot of people liked that book and Cameron Crowe had read that as well as my Stevie Ray Vaughn biography, "Texas Flood." So, it was much easier to get him and people like him to open up and talk to me and share their stories. So, there is a little bit of a process and a continuation; it was similar with the promoters from Watkins Glen, they had read "One Way Out" and really liked it so it was easy to get them to talk to me and want to be a part of it. That is the helpful part of writing about the same artist; there are things like that which I hadn't even really thought about and couldn't have anticipated until I actually did it."
Paul will be ready to field your questions and sign books this evening in Maplewood but he also has another event approaching in New York City which is much more involved; shall you miss this one or wish to see him again.
"You can buy the book from anywhere books are sold but if you're in New Jersey I urge you to purchase it from Words Bookstore here in Maplewood. I'm signing books here now and will continue to do so as long as I'm here and Words is here, which hopefully we'll both be for a very long time; you can come here and get signed copies of my books because I come here and sign them all of the time. I will be here speaking on July 20 at 7:30 p.m. and I have a big event on July 30 in New York at The City Winery which is a music event and book signing. I'll be signing books and my band Friends of the Brothers is playing with special guests including three sons of the Allman Brothers; Duane Betts, son of Dickie, Lamar Williams Junior, son of Lamar, and Vaylor Trucks, son of Butch who also happens to be the cute little kid on the cover of "Brothers and Sisters." That's pretty special and you can get links to all of that on my website and see all of that information there or on my Facebook page which is easy to find."
To Discover more about Alan Paul and his fascinating career, please visit http://alanpaul.net/.
That's it for this week! Please continue to support live and original music and until next week....ROCK ON!
